​In search of affinity; thinking through presence, time, creativity, and productivity.Godwin Koay

(This text was originally prepared for and read at Things that can happen as part of a sharing on 1 October 2015, coinciding with the end of a one-month artist residency. Header image: “who said we wanted a chief executive?” Nathan Road, 6 October 2014, 6:15am.)

I begin with the image I had selected for the Facebook event page. It is a still capture from video documentation made on the morning of 10th September, during a blockade action that took place at IFC in Central, with a coalition of activists cordoning off an entrance to the headquarters of Henderson Land Development.

This is not just an image of a protest, but also of workers entering their workplace. It became an image that for me represented a clash of ideological positions, which was to later on carry significance relevant to situations I found myself in. Different energies, motivations and trajectories come into view and contest.

A woman runs towards a perceived gap in the right-most edge of the lobby doors, where a stream of other office workers have converged upon. Protesters try to close their ranks, and bodies collide while clamouring ensues, some workers turn away looking frustrated, as if asking, “what has this got to do with me?” The woman squeezes through a gap in the crowd, and I lose sight of her.

Could anyone love their work so much? But perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. Perhaps what it signals is a deeper mire, one where people are bound to their role as workers, and as workers their relationship to society has been defined on economic terms. “Love”, exemplified in this seeming eagerness and commitment to a job, may only be a practical outlet, something tempered by the threat of having no means to live in an expensive city. Because what other choice could there be?

Anti-Northeast New Territories Development group action at IFC mall.

An activist continually and calmly speaks over the loudhailer, she explains that the workers have a choice, to enter their workplace by an alternate entrance that merely requires a little more walking to a different floor, but that the villagers, some of whom are present, who are being forcefully evicted from the Northeast New Territories, do not have such choice when faced with the combined might of government and property developer. At an instant, power, mobility, violence, and privilege are brought into the frame.

This is part of a longer series of direct actions taking place over the past few years and months, not just to raise the public and media profile of the issue, but also to place pressure on state and corporate apparatuses to retreat, connecting multiple social concerns such as food security, ecology, land rights, communal empowerment, legislative accountability, democratic participation, and capitalist growth.

Villagers and supporters at the action that lasted seven hours.

Intimately linked to this is the work of urban farming, which usually happens without permission, presumably oftentimes illegally. Spending time with one such farmer, I learned of a story about how he took soil from evicted lands, land now owned by the property development company, and used it to grow plants and edibles as part of a collective art project, a drawing of a line between points forming a symbolic gesture of resistance.

A makeshift booth by Very MK Rooftop Farm (pictured in poster) selling potted plants at Wooferten's mid-autumn Wooferhui, a no-permit community street market, 27 September 2015.

It was also only through a similar process of spending time with members of an anarchist collective in Yau Ma Tei (where I was mostly) that I learned of this early-morning protest. They were there too, and to my understanding they would rather lend their support to such a movement, than say, the struggle for so-called true universal suffrage as manifest in the Umbrella Movement. As people who were involved in the original Occupy Central at HSBC four years ago, their articulations and antagonism are certainly centred on alleviating and countering the structural violences produced by global capitalism, and on building solidarity with people exploited and marginalised by this hierarchical system enforced by the state.

Kitchen work at So Boring vegetarian food cooperative, a restaurant and gathering place with no fixed menu operating on pay-as-you-wish principles.

I've been thinking about this idea of spending time, as well as related notions of giving and sharing time, beyond the sense provided by material economic transaction or indebtedness. It's tied to how time is earned, but in this frame it takes on a tenor based on currency and credit. Are there other ways to approach it? Along a similar line, how else can we think about economies of exchange? It's clear to me then that how time is used and what it can be used for, or by whom, is very much connected to dynamics of power and privilege. The worker rushes for work because they are on the clock. The protester disrupts that for effect, themselves under the pressure from the clock of eviction, using the tension and urgency of competing temporalities to extract political leverage. From another view, the guerilla urban farmer gives time to their plants, and is attuned to rhythms, cycles, and lives that lay outside of imposed productivity.

Time after work.

This residency can be understood on one level as having afforded me the time and space and privilege to not worry about working for a wage, reconfiguring the notion of work (in both the sense of labour and of the art work) and productivity itself (as well as the binary dichotomy that places play, leisure, and consumption on the reverse side). A large part of this duration was simply comprised of being: of being a part of, being present, available, conscious, receptive, generous. I share and give my time. And I wonder if it would be possible to extend this in other ways, beyond the temporary, limited nature of an artist residency.

Affinity is a word I find myself returning to a lot. In his book “Gramsci is Dead”, Richard J.F. Day posits an “affinity for affinity” as a viable mode of resistance against what he calls the “hegemony of hegemony”, which signals to not just the hegemonic paradigms that guide how life is organised and controlled, but also how politics, even on the left, is often shaped in a way that seeks only to replace them with new hegemonies. And what this means is to instead focus energies on organising in the grassroots sense, based on horizontality, pursuing equality and solidarity with tools like mutual aid and cooperation.

"Just like that, a three thousand year old pine tree was felled!"

I found when was in Hong Kong this time last year. The brief visit exposed me to the existence of the anarchist collective as well as autonomously minded artists working within a social context. As a stated intent, my aim was to use this opportunity as a means to push myself into situations to expand upon these friendships, contemplating the meaning of transnational solidarities, to experience community (as odd as that sounds), and to understand how something similar might possibly take shape in Singapore, and how it might be nested within the space of art. None of this comes too naturally to me either, anxiety was a big hurdle at the beginning, uncertain of how to start conversations, or with whom, always burdened by the uneasiness of framing any of this as “research”, knowing that it may very well lead “nowhere”. But it led me to places I had not expected, from eating at a vegetarian food cooperative, to sitting in on collective meetings in Cantonese, to installing art on the streets, to dancing to music in a guerilla concert under a bridge.

Questions of “workability” have inevitably arisen from proposals of alternative working methods, notably for me during last week's talk at Para/Site. But these really are questions that operate on a logic of demanding to know what can succeed, yet so many of our assumed markers (often originating from outside the space of art) for success are couched in hidden ideological terms. And so it is here where the clash of positions I mentioned before reappears. Again, if productivity is the measure we employ, could that itself come under scrutiny? And how are we possibly to talk about political positions without even a common understanding of terms and logics?

游擊 (literally "guerilla") gig at a park under a raised motorway.

I can see how some may deem these radically alternative frames of being as illegitimate, disruptive and destructive in their divergence, almost like a tumour to be removed from the depoliticised and disinterested space of art. Or at best, something too “real” (or unrealistic) to be taken seriously as “art”, but still useful in accounting for “tolerance” and “diversity”. I wonder what they think of groups and projects like Wooferten here, or Post-Museum in Singapore, or Guerilla Girls, straddling the realm of activism like Occupy Museums, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Gulf Labor, Liberate Tate, or Just Seeds. Are they all pointless in their resistance? Or are some more valuable than others? At what point does something stop being acceptable as the mere critique safe enough for exhibition and consumption?

What is a critical language for art that can be used in a space not directly shaped by market dictates? Perhaps it is one informed more by an ethics than aesthetics? Still, what other forms can art and activism take? What potential lies in their intersection? These questions are in fact welcome, and would not have exploded in such a way (or in my face) given different circumstances. They are also questions that, in my mind, are not meant to be directed at people who intend to preserve the status quo.

​Returning to Things, in this room are numerous objects I had brought along with me or collected along the way. Some of these objects are artworks, some produced through collaboration, and others are works by others, fragments that inform or inspire me.

I am interested in how space can be activated, and clearly given my interests, would like to see it happen on terms that community – even that of two or three people – can set for itself. Indeed, this was one of the initial ideas I had when I was told there would be a library and reading space here – that perhaps disparate individuals and collectives could be linked together in a space of possibility, occupying, almost squatting it. And perhaps one of the urgent questions to address in such a meeting would have to do with the space itself.

Space and community could appear anywhere.

Many people I meet ask me as a resident artist about Things, and I feel the caution of some when they learn it is located in Sham Shui Po. Some others are curious about the background of this building as owned by a prominent art collector and property developer, and the uncertainty of what future plans for the site are after these two “interim” years. I think it is worth considering how artistic and cultural production, especially that which is trendy and ripe for commodification, subsumed under the so-called creative industries, are mobilised for the perceived value they're able to generate, or add, to a given property and neighbourhood. In turn, how does art contribute to redevelopment and gentrification of an area, or how can art actively resist that? And let’s be clear: gentrification refers to the displacement of a class of people from a place by the processes of capital that prices and forces them out. Might this be something that all cultural workers should be aware of? Is this at all a force that should be stopped? I feel that there is a conceptual conflation between development, renewal, and the provision of social services that need to be broken down. Perhaps art could make this happen – be challenging and discomforting to power. For this space, Things that can happen, what are the new connections that can be made, especially given its relative transience? What impact or relationship could it have with its immediate and wider surroundings? Does it need to actively seek engagement with publics that are not an art-viewing audience?

I'm asking myself the same things when I think about art, space, commune, the commons, and the political in Singapore's context. What too, can be attempted as part of a conversation with Things and Hong Kong going forward? What has been reconfirmed for me is that we have to make the change that we want to see; action is the expression of agency, and that is where autonomy begins.